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Friday, 19 October 2012

For
the first time ever, Twitter censored a controversial account at the
request of local government earlier this week. It was run by neo-Nazis.
The ban, which is the first of its kind under a relatively new Twitter
policy that gives the company "the ability to reactively withhold
content from users in a specific country -- while keeping it available
in the rest of the world." As such, the ban is only effective in Germany, however. The rest of the world is free to follow the bigots.

[RELATED: The Good, the Bad, and the Fuzzy of Twitter's New Censorship Rules]
We're not sure what to think about this one. On one hand, we want to
give Twitter a high five for not giving neo-Nazis another forum to
spread hatred. Neo-Nazis are really awful! This particular
group, Besseres Hannover or @hannoverticker, sparked a wildfire of
complaints from other readers for their racist, hateful and generally
unpleasant banter on the microblogging network. According to the Financial Times,
"it distributed racist materials in schools, sent abusive video
messages to officials and threatened physical violence against
immigrants." Who likes encouraging school children to be racists and
promoting xenophobic violence amongst the masses? Nobody does, because
that's hateful and horrible. Which is exactly why the Ministry of the
Interior in Lower Saxony banned the group, and local law enforcement
pressed Twitter to close the organization's Twitter account.
[RELATED: The Hack Behind The Twitter Meltdown]
The issue isn't so simple for free speech advocates. Twitter has long
been a haven for dissidents, activists and freedom fighters, the vast
majority of whom are not neo-Nazis. However, this particular
group fit all the qualifications that Twitter laid out when it warned in
January that it might "restrict certain types of content" in "countries
that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression
... such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content." Indeed,
Besseres Hannover had been banned by local law enforcement agencies, who
also asked Twitter to restrict access to the account. "We announced the
ability to withhold content back in Jan. We're using it now for the
first time re: a group deemed illegal in Germany," said Twitter's
general counsel, Alex MacGillivray, appropriately, in a tweet. His
previous tweet explained, "Never want to withhold content; good to have
tools to do it narrowly & transparently." The tweet before that
provided this beautiful photo of a sunset in San Francisco, but that's
not really relevant, is it?

So what'll the free speech
advocates think of all this? They're probably upset, huh? Well. It's
unclear. Like Twitter admitted, this is the first time they've enforced
their new local censorship measures, and it happened nearly a year after
they announced the idea. Is it such a big deal if Twitter censors one
account in one country once a year? What if it's a neo-Nazi organization
bent on spreading hatred and bigotry? That doesn't sound so bad,
especially since it's the example Twitter provided in its blog post
explaining the new feature that allows them to censor accounts.

But what if it's somebody else?
What if it's a French account that's begging for a crackdown on
anti-Semitism in the Parisian suburbs or an American account that's
hyper critical of the government's plans to thwart terrorist attacks?
Surely, local government might become impatient with such Twitter
accounts and could very well ask Twitter to censor it. In the past,
censorship is something that wasn't in Twitter's playbook. Now, that's
no longer true.

We'll have to wait and see how
Twitter puts this policy into play in the future. In the meantime, we
doubt many Germans are sorry that neo-Nazis have to try a little harder
to get their message heard.